The REIGN: Out of Tribulation

by Jeffrey McClain Jones

  THE

  REIGN

  Out of Tribulation

  A NOVEL

  By

  Jeffrey McClain Jones

  THE REIGN: Out of Tribulation

  Copyright © 2013 by Jeffrey McClain Jones

  All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced in any form by any electronic or mechanical means including photocopying, recording, or information storage and retrieval without permission in writing from the author.

  John 14:12 Publications

  www. john1412. com

  Cover photos from Getty Images, via Photos. com.

  To the people of The Vineyard Church of DuPage, for making it real and keeping it real.

  Prologue

  The recent history of the church, especially in the U. S. , has seen the rise and fall of various interpretations of the timetable for the last events, or “the end times.” I have known serious and sincere Christians whose opinions fall on various sides of exactly when the saints will be extracted from the Earth. Whether before the Tribulation (pre-trib), during the Tribulation (mid-trib) or after (post-trib), we agree that Jesus will return and raise his saints to be with him. Each of these interpretations of the timing of the rapture has a defensible foundation.

  This, on the other hand, is a work of fiction, though it is fiction set against real, future events, in my view. That means that these pages present a story, instead of a definitive eschatology. In order to write this story, however, I had to make a choice regarding when Jesus calls his followers home. For the most part, I chose the option that seems most likely to me, but that choice was influenced by what would make for a better story.

  This story is about what life might be like for humans on the Earth during the Reign of Jesus. That makes the exact timing of the rapture a minor issue. It is an issue, but not the point, and I’m hoping most readers will be able to skip past the controversies, to sample the story and see if it rings true.

  Another factor, one much more central to this story, is the presence of mortal human beings on the Earth when Jesus and the saints return to rule for a thousand years. Mike Bickle’s teaching on the end times alerted me to this fact and I count on him to defend it meticulously, if you need that. For me, the salient point is that, at the end of the Millennium, there is a great war (sorry for the spoiler), in which the nations surround the saints and then are destroyed by the power of God. The only logical explanation for the source of those violent opponents to the Reign of Jesus, in my opinion, is the presence of survivors from the Tribulation, who did not accept “the mark of the Beast” and yet were not followers of Jesus.

  This is where the story begins . . .

  CHAPTER ONE

  Rodney Stippleman glanced at newly formed calluses on each of his hands. Those hands offered a sort of map of his life. Most observers would first notice the missing tips of the middle and ring fingers on his right hand. A jagged scar running down the back of his left hand, only a few years old, shone pink against his dusty tan, slashing toward the joint at the base of his thumb. Other, less vibrant, scars each reminded him of an accident with a saw or nail gun, or of shell fragments and flying glass, or even a bullet that nearly missed.

  Now he rebuilt calluses on the same parts of his palms and fingers that had been hard and rough between the wars, when the weight of a hammer and circular saw replaced that of a gun. Rodney wondered whether these calluses would also be formed between wars, whether he would have to fight again, whether they would come for him. “They” being either the friends and neighbors who looked to him as a natural military leader, or his enemies—agents of some new regime, discontent to simply let him live in peace, far from the boardrooms and bunkers of the powerful and ambitious.

  He shook his head, miffed at himself for worrying, for allowing his mind to wander away from the place where he now stood, smelling the first fall leaves and feeling the sun on his shoulders. More than the anxiety of seeking future trouble, Rodney’s mind also evacuated the present and shoved him into the past, into some place of pain, either his own or someone else’s. He shivered slightly, his thoughts returning to where his forty-six-year-old body breathed the first sample of nighttime air, stirred into the vintage breezes of that cloudless day.

  He reached for a plastic jug half full of lukewarm water and took a quick slug. As he swallowed and replaced the blue plastic cap, he stopped to watch a plume of dust oozing along the road to his new home. The four-wheel-drive vehicle that approached made no sound, aside from the scratch of tires over gravelly pavement. He could see the solar panels built into its roof as it slowed down at the bottom of his rough driveway. The electric whir of the engine finally became audible as the dusty green SUV stopped just twenty feet away.

  Rodney was smiling; he knew that vehicle and relaxed at the sight of his friend Pete Wasser through the open driver’s-side window. Pete was also smiling, more reason for Rodney to be glad to see him. He knew Pete wouldn’t be smiling like that if he brought a warning about an impending attack, as he had done many times in the past.

  “Looking good, old man,” Pete said, stepping out of his car. About four years younger than Rodney, Pete looked at least ten years his junior, his dark hair still shiny and free from gray, his thin boyish face sketched with only sparse patches of whiskers, a two-week growth for Pete, nothing like the red wire that grew from Rodney’s ruddy chin.

  Pete’s quick shot compliment referred to the frame of the house Rodney was building. All that remained of the previous residence was the solid wooden porch, which he decided to keep, leaving him the odd project of building a house to match the porch. Nevertheless, any project with hammer and nails filled Rodney with life, like sap rising in an old tree. To build was to heal. His new house would heal the old farm, which the war had gutted, its residents killed; and it would heal his heart, where hate and loss had grown in tangles over a great wasteland.

  On Pete’s face, Rodney saw a freedom and ease that he couldn’t remember seeing there before. “You have some good news?”

  Pete shrugged. “Not really. But I don’t have any bad news and that’s good news, isn’t it?”

  Since the end of the postal service, where Pete had worked a few years earlier, he had become something of a town crier, racing around the countryside warning of the next approaching disaster or battle. As people died from the violence of men and of the gods, Pete had evolved into the de facto mayor of the little town of Somerville, where both he and Rodney had lived most of their adult lives—between wars, that is.

  Rodney ran his right hand through his sandy-gray hair, which grew full and thick over most of the top of his head. He grinned at Pete and wondered at his own sense of lightness during the past few weeks. It reminded him of when a high-pressure system finally arrives to clear out a long spell of stormy weather; except, this new feeling was more intense, now that he tried to quantify it.

  He asked Pete, “Do you feel it? Do you feel like everything is gonna get better from here?”

  The two men looked at each other for a moment, both stunned that Rodney had felt enough hope to say that out loud.

  Pete nodded, but said nothing, his silence an unusual response from him.

  Then they both laughed, afraid to say any more, to jinx their hope. They had seen in each other’s eyes, however, the same spark that they felt inside their wheel-rutted souls.

  Pete slapped the new window frame Rodney had been nailing and allowed his chuckling to tail off. “I did come out here for a purpose,” he said. “I was talking with Jay Middleton today and he was saying there was a perfectly good panel van parked behind his store that someone had abandoned a while back. He was thinking you could use it, if y
ou’re gonna get back to carpentry.”

  Rodney raised his eyebrows. He looked over at the battered military vehicle that he had been using to haul wood from town, whenever there was enough lumber available to make the two-mile trip worth it. A hybrid, it still used biodiesel to recharge its electric system and that precious liquid had become scarcer than pleasant memories of the Dictator’s rule.

  “Is it electric?” he asked, about the panel van.

  “Yep. Jay just wants someone to get it out of the way. He’s not selling it.”

  “He has what he needs?” Rodney wondered if there might be a catch to this deal.

  “Yeah, it was his idea. He was wantin’ to get rid of it, but thinks it just needs someone to clean it up and get it running. Batteries are dead now.”

  Rodney was a bit relieved to hear of the van’s liabilities. He had learned to distrust everything that seemed too good to be true. He had, like most of the survivors, come to expect promises to be found dragging disappointment close behind.

  “Any news of the wars?” he heard himself say, perhaps out of habit, or to find the cloud against the sunshine he had been enjoying lately.

  Pete tipped his head and shrugged again. “It’s hard to know what to believe.”

  That wasn’t enough for Rodney. “What’ve you heard?”

  “Only the craziest stuff seems to be making it through to us these days,” Pete said.

  Rodney could tell that his friend was not just teasing him, Pete really was uncomfortable with the news he had been hearing, but that didn’t stop Rodney from pressing for more. “Like what, what are you hearing?”

  “You don’t wanna know.” Pete laughed.

  “What? Why don’t I wanna know?”

  “Cause it’s crazy, that’s why.”

  “Why won’t you tell me?”

  “If the only news I was hearing was that Santa Clause had been seen flying his sleigh all over the world, would you want me to tell you?”

  Rodney looked confused.

  Pete waved his hands in the air. “We’re not getting any reliable news. Gene Spitzer says he’s getting a signal from the old Internet once in a while, he’s got that broad-spectrum wireless setup. He says there was some kind of ‘alien invasion’ in the Middle East that ended the war. That’s the kinda crazy stuff I’m hearing.”

  Rodney laughed. He nodded and then shook his head. “Okay, I see what you mean. It’s just hard to not know what’s going on.” He turned to look eye-to-eye with Pete. “I like being away from all the nut cases and their masters-of-the-universe stuff. But it would be good to know if we can have some peace for a while.”

  “No more earth quakes,” Pete said. “I haven’t felt a tremor for weeks, have you?”

  “Nothing.”

  “So maybe the whole end-of-the-world thing is over,” Pete said.

  Rodney laughed at the irony of that. “So the end is over. Now what?”

  “I don’t know,” Pete said, then ventured, “extra innings?”

  They both laughed now. Rodney slapped Pete on the back, raising a small cloud from his shirt and fisherman’s vest. That puff of dust shown orange in the late sunlight. They talked a bit longer, about the availability of good lumber and nails and about the perfect weather they were having for so late in the year. That area, part of what had once been the State of Iowa, rarely saw a string of such warm and pleasant weather in November, even after the global warming of the previous decades. The sun also seemed to have lost its bite, as if the faltering ozone layer had been replenished, somehow.

  Pete finally stepped off the porch, “Gotta get home to Jenny. She’ll think I gotta girlfriend or something.”

  Rodney made a crude joke about Pete and the prospect of him having a mistress and they parted with the same smiles with which they had greeted each other.

  Rodney’s smile faded as his friend drove away and he turned back to his unfinished house. He had closed in a lean-to at the back of the house, which would eventually be a mudroom for people entering the back door. For now, it was his little shack of a home.

  Squatting behind the house, he tossed bits of splintered wood into the coals of the little campfire outside his shack, the smoke rising lazily in the slight breeze, no cover over the fire with no rain clouds in sight. Rodney squinted at the sunset and began a mental meander back four years, when a tall, slender redhead stood at a bedroom window looking out at a similar sunset.

  Anna was enjoying a peaceful moment in which the color of the sky transcended all of the insanity of natural disasters and political catastrophes. Rodney relived her voice calling him.

  “Rod, come see the sunset. It’s beautiful.”

  Her smile just refracted the sun, a sparkle on eyes and teeth, when she looked at him entering the doorway to their bedroom. He knew at that moment that this picture would stay with him, even though he didn’t know that it would be their last night together. He didn’t know then that both of his children would also die in the following year and that he would be left alone with his memories.

  Those memories had never felt as friendly and peaceful as they did this night next to the fire, the sunset rolling from golden to red. For the first time in years, he felt loneliness without fear and hatred. Where had this peace come from? What happened to those angry accusations that echoed inside his head every time he had remembered her before?

  Rodney looked away from the sun, to where the sky was dark blue and the first faint stars were beginning to appear. All at once, a concert of shooting stars crossed from east to west. How strange to see them so early in the evening and so many bright streaks across the sky.

  The warm autumn evening settled on the fields around his new little home as Rodney assembled the basics for a simple supper, biscuits fried in a pan and some carrots fried in the remaining grease. He had left out the bit of ham, strangely uninterested in meat that night.

  The next morning Rodney woke to the sound of a coyote rummaging through some cans and boxes outside the little lean-to. He cracked open the door, to find the animal’s pointy nose lowered, hungry eyes looking up at the man apologetically. In a fit of compassion, Rodney pushed the door open and tossed the biscuit he was saving for his breakfast to the forlorn looking beast. The coyote dashed in, grabbed the biscuit and dashed away, but slowed down and looked back while still in the side yard. For just a second, the coyote’s salt and pepper tail wagged when he saw Rodney peacefully observing his departure.

  Rodney snickered to himself. “I must be lonely,” he said aloud. “Taking up with some questionable company.”

  Growing up in rural parts, Rodney had learned to get to work early. Living by himself, he paid little attention to niceties such as regular meals and bathing. But today he was going into town, so he only worked for a couple of hours before heating some water in a rusty old basin and searching out a bar of red, glycerin soap that he had stashed away, salvaged from an anticlimactic military raid into Chicago, years ago. That soap connected Rodney to civilized days gone by, when people had time and opportunity to concern themselves with what color to make soap and what exotic scents to cook into it. That soap was one of the few luxuries he had enjoyed in the last four years and stood out uniquely in his present bleak, monastic lifestyle.

  When he stowed the last of his tools in his homemade, wooden toolbox—the handle an old closet hanging rod—he glanced up at the field next to his house to see the coyote lying under the shade of wild sunflowers that had volunteered to reinforce the fence line to the spotty lawn. His new friend appeared to be overseeing the work on the house. Rodney nodded to the big male coyote, whose long legs stretched leisurely in front of him.

  With the water warmed up, the bar of red soap in his hand and a bit of privacy behind his little shack, Rodney began his bath. One commodity he didn’t have in good supply was washcloths. He just hadn’t made them a priority. He rubbed a gray dishrag over the lines of his farmer’s tan. The rag rolled and wadded under his hand and barely improved on not having
any sort of rag. The first time he stopped to rinse, pouring a cup full of water over his back, he noticed that the coyote had left his post under the sunflowers. As he struggled to revive the little rag again, he caught motion out of the corner of his left eye and spun around to see the coyote approaching. The animal stopped still at the challenge implied in Rodney’s quick spin.

  Rodney also stood still. That big coyote held in his mouth something that looked like a hand towel, about half covered in tan dirt. Rodney stared incredulously, as the coyote inched forward and dropped the towel near the same spot where he had received the biscuit that morning. A trade? Having a closer look at the hand towel, Rodney still didn’t move. Standing there wearing nothing but khaki boxer shorts, with a thin lather of soap covering his right leg, the man froze in disbelief.

  No one would believe this one, Rodney assured himself. In fact, he doubted he would tell anyone this impossible story. Nevertheless, he did walk over and pick up the towel. He looked at the coyote, now back in his shady spot, and said, “Thanks, old boy.” What else could he say?

  After rinsing the towel with some water from the pump by the house, he found that it made a much better washcloth, even a luxurious washcloth, the terry fibers still full, and a hand towel, of course, being much larger than the dish rag. He couldn’t stop laughing to himself as he finished his washing and rinsing. It would be hard not to tell this story.

  Rodney cranked up the old Powell Fighting Vehicle (PFV), half-electric and half-diesel powered. Both fossil fuel and electricity for a battery charge were hard to get, but not impossible. The old-fashioned windmill behind his future house provided enough electricity to get the car running and, he hoped, to keep it running all the way into town. The creased and bullet-riddled green-gray sides of the improvised vehicle contained history just like Rodney’s scarred and clipped hands. The seat, he had commandeered from a burnt out luxury sedan, rusting by the side of the road, between his new home and town. The body-hugging leather seat offered another bit of luxury, in the midst of a spare and utilitarian life.